Significance of the Decalogue

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 511.

The Torah includes hundreds of commandments (generally enumerated in Rabbinic Judaism as 613 mitzvot), including the ten from the Decalogue. When compared to the whole canon of Jewish law, the Ten Commandments are not given any greater significance in observance or special status. In fact, when undue emphasis was being placed on them, their daily communal recitation was discontinued.^[33] Jewish tradition does, however, recognize them as the ideological basis for the rest of the commandments; a number of works (starting with Rabbi Saadia Gaon) have made groupings of the commandments according to their links with the Ten Commandments.

The traditional Rabbinical Jewish belief is that the observance of these commandments and the other mitzvot are required solely of the Jewish people, and that the laws incumbent on humanity in general are outlined in the seven Noahide Laws (several of which overlap with the Ten Commandments). In the era of the Sanhedrin transgressing any one of six of the Ten Commandments theoretically carried the death penalty, the exceptions being the First Commandment, honoring your father and mother, saying God's name in vain, and coveting, though this was rarely enforced due to a large number of stringent evidentiary requirements imposed by the oral law.